Social Media

Instagram Video: Don't Make Me Love You

Vine has 13 million users. Instagram has 130 million. Facebook, Instagram's parent company has over a billion users worldwide. Twitter has roughly half a billion users. Keep those numbers in mind, because they play a crucial role in the future success of Instagram's latest endeavor: Instagram Video.

As virtually everyone suspected he would, Instagram's Kevin Systrom, with the briefest of intros by Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, introduced Instagram video capabilities. They arrive in Instagram 4.0 for iPhones and Android, are available today and are already being used by people just like me.

Social video was never of any particular interest to me until Twitter’s Vine App for iPhone came along. Even then, I thought six-second videos were too short to express much of anything. Yes, that sounds silly when you think about the power of a single image. That's what draws me to Instagram: a single image, beautifully rendered, to tell a larger tale.

Vine has never offered the ability to make attractive, moving images with filters, but it did, it turns out, have a very different and powerful feature that all-but-transformed the art of storytelling — at least in the six-second form. As soon as I (and many others before me) realized you could stop and start recording with the touch of a finger on the screen, I began creating stop-motion videos: six-second tales that could pack in a lot of information. I was hooked.

My Vine feed is full of amazing Vine artists. People like Khoa who is so good he's been contracted by major brands to make Vines for them. He even created the Peanuts' first Vine.

I'm not that good, but I have a great time manipulating odd objects at home and in the office to make up stuff like this.

One of my better Vines might attract 30 likes. I have no idea how many people have viewed my Vines because Vine and its parent company, Twitter, don't track that stat. Other successful Viners, like Will Sasso are not animators, but they attract tens of thousands of likes (no relation to Facebook Likes) with, often, their mini comedy skits.

I guess that's the most remarkable thing about Vine: how quickly the community has grown and how it's nurturing these amazing talents. I love being a very small part of it.

Enter the Competition

Now we have Instagram with Video. Yes, it is a direct competitor to Vine. No two ways about it.

Instagram smartly avoided many of Vine’s initial missteps, like not releasing on two platforms or leaving out hashtag and front-facing camera support. It also went further: Since you touch a giant record button instead of the view screen to record video, you can touch the screen preview image to focus and adjust exposure. That's still not possible on Vine. Instagram with Video even lets you choose the preview or thumbnail image. That’s a big deal since that image will likely be the difference between someone viewing your video or not.

And there are filters.

Filters and Instagram's new "Cinema" technology can turn a crappy video into a decent-looking one. Systrom said Instagram "teamed up with the world's leading video scientists to create Cinema." I'm not sure what that means, but the technology does appear to help a bit when you can't manage to keep your hands steady or find the right lighting.

Obviously, no one is surprised that Instagram with Video also includes its own set of filters. They say they're customized for video, but mostly seem like variants of what you can find in the still-image portion of Instagram.

Instagram is not a carbon copy of the Vine App. The biggest difference: time. Instagram settled on a 15-second limit for its videos (and a minimum of three seconds), and the videos do not immediately auto-play or ever loop.

Don't Make Me Like You

I downloaded Instagram 4.0 almost as soon as Systrom stopped speaking. I've been a long-time Instagram user and even though Twitter introduced Instagram-like filters and editing tools, I still use the former tool roughly half the time. There's a pretty simple reason for that: Because Twitter and Facebook can't get along, Instagram photos are no longer shown inline in my Twitter feed. Inline photos lead to better engagement. So when I want to tell a newsier or more informational story, I use Twitter's photo tools. For pretty pictures, I still use Instagram, where I can at least record likes (which are somehow preferable on photos to pure Retweets).

I actually like Instagram quite a bit, but I did not want to like Instagram with Video and set out to find all the ways in which it is inferior to Vine's App.

My first test was, naturally, an animation.

Instagram with Video's interface isn’t exactly built for animation, but then neither was the Vine app. In fact, the key difference here is the visibility of the record bar: Vine's is fat and green and Instagram's is red and very, very thin. Naturally I fumbled with recording properly. Vine had taught me to touch the middle of the screen. Eventually, I got the hang of using the big record button. Still, because the record bar is so tiny, I could hardly tell when I was recording. Like Vine, you have to be touching the screen to record. When you release, it stops. My first "animation" test was a disaster. It looked terrible, and I declared that Instagram Video could not hack it.

I continued testing, and started to get the hang of recording segments, or clips, as they call them, and deleting ones that didn't work. I also started to see that the segments could be of almost any length, including very, very short.

I worried I had misjudged the Instagram with Video's animation skills.

My second test proved that to be the case. Just touching that record button did capture a tiny bit of video, and while I can’t cherry pick which tiny segments I wanted to remove, I could delete them in reverse chronological order if I wanted to redo a whole portion of the animation. Better yet, I could adjust focus and exposure for every captured frame.

That was better than Vine.

Adding a filter to my "art" was a nice touch, but I think it may almost detract from the work. I'd like to show you my handiwork, but Instagram Video doesn't support embedding (nor does Instagram photo). Score one for Vine.

It's About Time and Numbers

Fifteen seconds goes by pretty fast, but not nearly as fast as six. The Vine video animators among us will feel this most acutely as we try and use Instagram with Video to make "full-length" Instagram videos or, as I like to call them, InstaVids. Of course just as with Vine, you can make shorter animations, but without the ability to loop, these tiny animations end up feeling a bit truncated. A loop offers the illusion of length. Those who do manage to fill the full 15 seconds — not an easy task — may also struggle a bit more to hold their audience's attention. I already had one person tell me that 15-second videos are boring; "make it shorter."

Video with Instagram (or Instagram Video, as I prefer), is going to hurt Vine. Not so much because it’s a well-executed update. That helps, but, as is often the case, this is a numbers game. Instagram's installed- and user-base is vastly larger than Vine's. 130 million people already have it installed and they will easily update. They've so far, according to Systrom, shared 16 billion photos on the platform and add 1 billion likes every single day.

I'm not saying I’m walking away from Vine. No way. But I cannot dismiss or ignore Instagram Video. It isn’t perfect, it isn't Vine, but the numbers tell the tale. It will be popular, it will be used and it will take the wind out of Vine's sails.

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